The Press Box - Aaron Rodgers 2024, Don Lemon–Elon Musk, the Vibes Beat, and 'The Girls on the Bus' With The Washington Post’s Kara Voght

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

On the Final Edition, Bryan is joined by Kara Voght of The Washington Post. They kick off the show with the Venn diagram of sports, politics, and media as they discuss Aaron Rodgers's potential vice presidential candidacy in support of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (1:50). Then they discuss Don Lemon’s interview with Elon Musk and what led to the end of their partnership (13:20). Later, they give an official review of 'The Girls on the Bus' and discuss how the reporters are portrayed on the show (23:37). Bryan closes by asking Kara rapid-fire questions about her career, including how she covers the vibes beat (47:18). Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Kara Voght Producer: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, over 25 years ago on September 29, 1998, we watched a brainy girl with curly hair drop everything to follow a guy she only kind of knew to college. My name is Amanda Foreman, though maybe you know me better as Megan Rotundi, the roommate with the mysterious box. I'm teaming up with my Felicity husband, Greg Grunberg, and the ringer's Juliet Litman, to revisit our favorite moments from the show and talk to the people who helped shape it. The rewatch begins on March 13th. Listen to Dear Felicity on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox, Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Brian Waters. Coming up on today's podcast, a segment I never thought I'd say out loud,

Aaron Rogers is on a vice presidential shortlist. And there's already a new reason, allegedly, not to vote for him. Plus, the Don Lemon-Elon-E-Lum Must Showdown on, camera and off, women's college basketball on the eve of the tourney, a review of the girls on the bus, a new series about reporters covering a presidential campaign, and we explore the vibes beat. All of this with today's guest host. Kara Vote is a politics reporter for the styles section at the Washington Post. She worked for Rolling Stone and Mother Jones before that.

She has written fantastic pieces about everything from Taylor Swift's possible presidential endorsement to John Meacham's very real presidential counseling. I'm excited to have her here. Kara, welcome to the press box. Thank you so much. I maintain several parasycial relationships with you and your ringer colleagues. So it's great to be on a ringer show and hang out. Let's take the para out of that right here. Because I have got a perfect story for us, for our little part of the Venn diagram where media, sports, and politics meet. Aaron Rogers is getting sized up to run for vice president. Help me with the right only in journalism

verb here. Is it sized up? Vetted. Do we say the word vetted out loud? Although I suppose the vetting is happening now in real time as opera research finally kind of comes out about him. Is presidential timber or vice presidential timber still a thing? Or is that more of the Jack Germand era of political journalism?

I have not heard that one in a while. So Rebecca Davis O'Brien of the New York Times wrote that Robert Kennedy Jr. approached both Rogers and Jesse the Body Ventura about being his running mate, and that both men have, quote, welcomed the overtures. What do we make of Aaron Rogers 2024? What do we make of Aaron Rogers 2024? I can't believe I said that out loud, to your point. I mean, I believe it was in Rebecca. his piece that RFK Jr. was looking at people who meshed with his sensibilities, which we know are pretty conspiratorial, tend toward the anti-vaxing. And Aaron Rogers fits that bill. So I guess that's what I make of it is that is the state of RFK Jr's third party run. Why not? We talk a lot about vice presidential candidates or potential ones auditioning to be vice president,

which in this cycle they seem to do by actually running for president in some cases. Aaron Rogers has been auditioning to be the I do my own research candidate for many years now. The last one on ESPN. Every week. I don't know if he thought it would manifest itself this way. Maybe he thought I would have a Roganesque podcast. That's what my future was. But this has been his corner, as we like to say here at the ringer.

this has very much been his corner it's funny i sit near the sports section at the washington post and so they have ESPN on the monitors all day long i feel like i've caught pretty much every episode of the pat maccophie show over the last year since i've been here and the guy has a lot to say i mean just the book recommendations alone what is it the four agreements is something that he brings up the alchemist by paolo qualo i think is how you say the name He's been doing takes for a long time, and the idea that that would then cross over into American politics formally, I would argue that he has a role in informally as an influencer, as someone who can change discourse based on what he says, the idea that he would actually

show up and take the stage somewhere and make speeches, and gosh, it boggles the mind. There's a tiny group of athletes, I think, that would A think they could be vice president and B, actually want to be vice president, and Aaron Rogers is in that very tiny group? Aaron Rogers is definitely in that tiny group. The way that he seems to enjoy attention for his ideas, for his takes, sometimes he's a contrarian. I feel like just for the sake of attention seeking.

Sometimes it could be hard to tell how seriously to take him at any given point in time because of the way that he carries himself, which, you know, That's a prerequisite for being a politician wanting to be the center of attention. So great. Welcome to the trail. And that's what I keep coming away with. We've been lured into yet another Aaron Rogers news cycle somehow.

I mean, the one that just cracked me up so much last year was when he blew his Achilles in week one. And then toward the end of the season, there were these little reports out there. Uh-oh. He may be coming back. He may be coming back. And somehow we went directly from Adam Schaefter reporting these things to political reporters doing a new version of Erud Rogers might be in swing states come this fall. Exactly.

It's pretty incredible to how much he, I mean, I guess so far what he's done is he's had one statement publicly about some of the reporting that's gone on. Maybe we actually should back up and talk about why he made that statement before we launch into it. Absolutely. So the scoop about him being on the short list came out Tuesday. And then Wednesday, we got another story from CNN's Pamela Brown and Jake Tapper that Rogers in conversations had shared Sandy Hook conspiracy theories.

Here's Jake Tapper. In 2013, when CNN's Pamela Brown was covering the Kentucky Derby, she was introduced to Rogers, hearing that she was a journalist at CNN. Rogers began attacking the news media for, quote, covering up important stories, Rogers then brought up the Sandy Hook shooting and said the news media was intentionally ignoring that the shooting wasn't real, that it was a government inside job. CNN also had a second anonymous source saying they had a similar experience with Rogers. And then this morning, right for you and I came on, Kara Rogers denied this on Twitter.

As I'm on the record saying in the past, what happened in Sandy Hook was an absolute tragedy, I am not and have never been of the opinion that the events did not take place. So what did you make of this news cycle? I just thought I had when I saw CNN story yesterday is why are we just hearing about this now? We spent the last, what, five minutes talking about Aaron Rogers being a constant year-round public figure, whether or not the NFL is in season or not. And the fact that someone was sitting on this, a news person who was sitting on this information for 11 years, just strikes me as completely insane.

I mean, it's not like he isn't prominent. It's not even like, you know, I understand when things are on my beat. Sometimes I find something out and I, you know, let the right reporter know, like, hey, you cover Trump. I heard this thing. Might want to look into it. I don't really know how I feel about Pamela Brown not sharing that up until this moment. What did you think?

I'm so glad you took us there because I had exactly the same thought. I mean, as Jake Tapper says there, this was not some private conversation or meeting him, you know, he was introduced to her. This is a CNN reporter. And his message was, why isn't it? CNN covering important stories like X. That's what she says. At this point, 2013, he already won the Super Bowl two years before that.

And I don't know. I mean, it's one of those things. As you say, he is undoubtedly a public figure. Was this, you know, is there a line of thought with somebody who has this information where he say, well, he's an athlete and therefore somehow that doesn't bubble to the surface as quickly as it would as if he were a politician or a captain of industry? or something else? Yeah, I was thinking about that.

I was thinking about it in the context of Tom Brady, who he is not Aaron Rogers-like in the way that he talks about vaccines, but he is someone who we know has this alternative kind of health lifestyle thing he does with Alex Guerrero, his trainer. The way we know about it is, A, the intersection that it has. had when he was playing professional sports that, you know, he would do different things than his teammates. He always bring Guerrero with him. We also know about it because he was Tom Brady, the most interesting, arguably the best quarterback of all time, and there was a lot written

about him. And this was brought up. I guess I could make the argument that, well, Aaron Rogers is incredible quarterback, was an incredible quarterback, not quite Brady level. And also, like, what is the relevance of that view on his day job? I mean, the reason we know about his perspective on COVID is because he had to pay a fine, because he kept saying he was immunized. He wouldn't say he was vaccinated. He was very specific. He's immunized. And I think that perhaps if we had not gone through a global pandemic, we wouldn't know so much about Aaron Rogers's views on things. But I don't know. I'm of the opinion that that is, that's really, really newsworthy nonetheless.

us. Yeah. And maybe just because it was said in something of an informal-ish setting, like if he'd sat down for a profile with ESP in the magazine, as he did once upon a time. And if he'd come out with these views, 100% those views are in the piece that runs an ESP in the magazine. Those would not have been swept aside because Aaron Rogers was a quarterback. Maybe because it was, I guess, again, I think you and I are trying at an idea that we don't totally believe in here. And even if it wasn't news in 2013, as you, pointed out, he's styled himself as a public intellectual for years now. Seems pretty relevant. The guy who's going on television or going on podcasts and talking about vaccines also believes this,

allegedly, that seems really relevant. And another thing, if you want to, or another reason to shove this onto the front page or put this in print is Aaron Rogers now plays quarterback for the New York Jets. Right. This is a horrific event, very important to the people. as I didn't tell you being from Connecticut of this area. Absolutely. I mean, especially that part of the state. Newtown is on the western side of the state,

not super close to Manhattan, but it would be considered to be the New York area of Connecticut. Something else I was thinking about, Ryan, in terms of this story, whenever I'm going on a new beat or reporting on something I don't know much about, sometimes I think to myself, oh, I'll hear something kind of strange and say, well, maybe everyone just knows that about this person.

Maybe because I'm not an expert here and I'm not familiar with this, that perhaps everyone knows that Aaron Rogers thinks this about Sandy Hook, you know, for example. I wonder some of that was going on, too, of people just being in settings with him and assuming, well, the sports reporters must have them under control, right? This isn't my job to bring this to the fore. I think that's a really bad attitude to have in journalism. I think you should always, you know, keep those antenna up and have questions when you hear something like that. But I could maybe, again, I don't believe this, but if I had to make an argument as to why this is the first time this is coming out, maybe something in that possibility realm, too. If I'm an ESPN right now and I'm contemplating another year of Aaron Rogers Tuesdays on that Pat McAfee show that's playing in the Washington Post Sports Department, ESPN, a Connecticut-based company, man, I am, I am, I am, I am. I don't see how you can do that at this point.

You know, his denial on the record, whatever. I just don't see how you can do that. Put that on your sports airwaves, at least in live, unedited fashion. I agree. I'm imagining there are conversations happening perhaps ESPN and among others right now, which may be very well. Why Aaron Rogers tweeted out what he did, time will tell. I'm sure the story will continue to develop with the next couple of days

the weeks. Yes, RFK Jr. making his VEP announcement March 26th in Oakland, some people pointed out that Aaron Rogers played college football at Berkeley at Cal. All right, topic number two for you. Don Lemon, formerly of CNN, brought his talk show to X. Between him and Tucker Carlson X has turned into the social media app for cable hosts in exile. Lemon's first guest, wouldn't you know was his new boss, Elon Musk. Here's a little bit of how that interview went. Do you believe that X and you have some responsibility to moderate hate speech on the platform, that you wouldn't have to answer these questions from reporters about the great replacement theory as it relates to Democrats? I don't have to answer these questions. The great replacement theory as it relates to Jewish people.

Do you think that? I don't have to answer questions from reporters. Don, the only reason I've done this interview is because you're on the X platform and you ask for it. Otherwise, I would not do this interview. So you don't think, do you think that you wouldn't get in trouble or you wouldn't be criticized for these things? I'm criticized possibly. I could care less. Lemon went on to ask Musk about ketamine, about other views that Musk is either expressed or platformed. And then Musk canceled the partnership, Lemon says, hours after this interview because he didn't like the questions. What did you make of Musk and Lemon? I found it to be an incredibly predictable series of events.

I don't know I don't know that it would have really turned out any other way. I mean, I'm curious as to why Lemon wanted to interview Musk. There's obvious reason, right? I mean, he's been a difficult interview to get. What's the last time we heard from him in a setting like that? Was the New York Times? Had that sit down with him sometime last year.

With Andrew Ross Sorkin. Am I remembering that, right? Yes. Yes, exactly. I would be remiss if I did not point out that this was, was the entire internet's reaction to of like, oh, of course. Lemon had a show. Lemon interviews Musk. Lemon loses show.

Kara Swisher had a like peak media tweet on this yesterday. I don't know if you saw this. It had everything. Scoop, all caps. Yes. As I told him would happen, Don Lemon, the owner of this platform, Elon Musk, to terse text to his reps, contract terminated.

I loved, I loved that. tweet insider status as I told him would happen scoop yeah it was good day and with carra the only question was was she telling don lemon or Elon or both right what happened actually have the grammar is kind of strange on it um yeah it's it's really really wild yeah not really news that Elon Musk is mercurial uh this is the guy who bought Twitter X and then tried not to buy Twitter X within days. I thought it was really funny to see Lemon on CNN last night,

the network that fired him so that he could talk about the experience of being fired or something like being fired by Elon. Yeah. My sense of that is perhaps in this moment, I mean, Elon has said that he's not that interested

in facts, in reporters, in truth, necessarily. And for John Lemon going on CNN is a legitimate place to talk about that perspective to try to put what Elon Musk has done into context. But I don't know. I don't think it was a particularly warm homecoming from what I saw of it. No. What did you think? A little strained. That quite as strained is the Lemon Musk interview. But you know, as Lemon is pointing out, like he's asking things to Elon that Elon has talked about before in

the past the musk has talked about or tweeted about or exed about whatever we want to call it these these were not private things necessarily these are things that musk has talked about no no i'm asking you about that thing that you put online but apparently that was the red line my thoughts also went to jim rome the sports talk host who is going to do a show on exed romey you may want to check your dms on that one before that comes to pass also are you as fascinated as i am about former cable news hosts are looking for things to do and find themselves in this completely unmoored space because they make perfect sense as cable news hosts and then they're not anymore and then you're kind of like now what completely i i worked for katie currick is one of my

first jobs in journalism and i i feel like that has been she is rather the archetype of this right of someone who had a big daily audience and then a big evening audience and then a newsletter and a podcast and sometimes she tweets. Yeah. And I feel like she was, I think she says a lot of wonderful work. I also think that some mediums are better for her than others. Yeah. Dan Rather maybe is the only one who's mastered this by becoming a Twitter account who's

talking about democracy and related subjects. But again, he's become a resistance guy. He's become a resistance guy. That's why that works. All right, college basketball. We're sitting here on the eve of the NCAA tournaments, both the women's and the men's tournaments.

As I mentioned, you grew up in Connecticut, in the shadow of the Huskies dynasty, Yukon Huskies, of course. What have you made the last couple seasons of women's college basketball and the way it's been covered? Oh, it's been unreal.

just starting with the numbers alone, the idea that there are all of these television viewing records that get shattered year after a year. There's two expectations coming for the women's NCAA tournament. I love the stars that we have, Caitlin Clark of Iowa, Angel Breeze of LSU. We've got even star coaches now, like Don Staley, the undefeated South Carolina team.

There's a good rivalry right now, I think, between LSU's Reese and IOS Clark. I mean, Clark is unstoppable, just given, you know, her records that she's broken for points scored. She has this ridiculous way of shooting that I feel like it's going to change the game forever. The numbers speak for themselves. More people are watching women's sports than ever, but it does sometimes feel a little bit like among sports reporters, among commentators. They're like, oh, women's basketball is a thing.

did you know it's a thing? Women play the sport of basketball? Which for me, you know, growing up, I grew up right next to Yukon. My high school was on Yukon's campus. We knew there was women's basketball. Those women were legends starting in 95, Rebecca Lobo, up through the early odds with Diana Tarasi and Sue Bird and Swin Cash,

and then drew now with Maya Moore. and, you know, some of the incredible folks that have graduated later on. Brianna Stewart, obviously, is one of the best players in the WNBA. So, yeah, I appreciate the interest nationally. I think in some respects, having all of these great teams and great players is, as much as Yukon is no longer the dynasty it was. It is good for popularity. But I wish people recognize that there's been almost 30 years of incredible women's basketball

happening at the collegiate level. Absolutely. the shocked affect you talk about is very, very comical. It is very, very funny. Oh, whoa. I'll tell you the number that popped out for me, or not even a number, but I guess a news story. This isn't puck.

John Iran reported this that Fox, which is kind of the de facto Big Ten network now when the contracts all changed, wanted to put together an NIL package so that Caitlin Clark would go back to Iowa for one more year. Now, we've seen NIL packages use like that with football teams or friends of the football team. Like, hey, can we talk you out of the draft for one more year with a little money? But for a network, and this was actually the story here was the network Fox was going to reach out to other networks who would show Clark's games to put together packages.

Like, no, no, we want you to be a personality on our airwaves for one more year. That's fascinating. That is fascinating. And I think it does speak to an interesting thing that happens in women's basketball, that does not happen with men's basketball, which is the financial incentives to go in men's basketball from the NCAA to the NBA are huge, right? I mean, we're talking ridiculous contracts. I looked this up actually not that long ago because I went to see a Brooklyn Nets game,

and Brianna Stewart was there. She plays the New York Liberty. She was sitting in the crowd. and she stood up and waved at people when they said her name over the loudspeaker. I looked it up and I was like, how much does Brianna Stewart make a WMBA player? It's less than $200,000 as a pro athlete.

Now she's a lot of money, I think, coming in from endorsements in NIL, so to speak. But for women, staying in college and building out your reputation at that level, when people are watching, there might be more eyeballs on the NCAA. tournament, then there will be on any game they play after this. And I think that, you know, the economics of that with the NIL that we're seeing now, I will be fascinated to see how this

plays out. I mean, Clark is doing the draft. I think she'll take a lot of money with her. She will continue to do the endorsement she has now. But for future players, I will be very curious to see if another box-like package comes together. All right. A topic I know you and I are both going to have a lot of opinions about. We can wait no longer. We must review the new Mac series, The Girls on the Bus. Two episodes came out Thursday.

It's about campaign reporters. It was co-created by a former New York Times campaign reporter, Amy Chosick, who wrote a very good book called Chasing Hillary back about the 2016 campaign. Let's do, shall we,

a little bit of a brief and mostly spoiler-free synopsis? here. So we can get people caught up if they have not seen this show yet. All right. So Sadie McCarthy, played by Melissa Benoist, is a political reporter for a paper called The New York Sentinel, which proves that the name of the Times. Right.

And I was just going to say it proves that whenever there's a newspaper and a movie or TV show, it must sound like a right-wing website. That's right. That's absolutely right. Don't know who made that rule. Sadie, we learned previously covered a Hillary-like presidential candidate. She got very invested in that candidate, not only journalistically, but emotionally. When that candidate lost, she was to her professional embarrassment captured crying by someone else's cell phone.

That then goes, the video goes viral. And she now is covering her next presidential cycle after that. Sadie's joined on the trail by three other reporters, a Washington, post-like newspaper reporter who specializes in big scoops, a correspondent for a Fox-like TV network, and an Instagrammer. A DSA-adjacent Instagrammer.

DSA-adjacent Instagrammer, yes. So that's the setup. Where do you want to start with the girls on the bus? Where do I want to start? I want to talk about the things the show does well. Okay. Because I think that there's a lot that was surprisingly accurate to me. I watched a lot of journalism fiction.

I'm sure you do, Brian, between TV shows and movies. And there were some things they got really right. Like in the first episode, when Sadie is on the phone and she has to leave for Iowa in like three hours and hasn't packed yet, that felt very real to me. This has how journalists pack. right, right. Hurriedly and belatedly. Precisely. In that same scene, she's on the phone.

I think she's pitching some flack on a stunt, as we call them, in feature writing. She goes, can I go boxing with Carolyn Bennett, who is one of the candidates? And she says, it's sort of a metaphor for her role as governor. I thought that was fantastic. Like, a somewhat ridiculous phrase, but, like, that is what stunt journalism often is. Like you go and you try to like set up some kind of event or task with your subject to to foster some kind of metaphor to write about. 100%. And thinking the candidate will go for the stunt pitch maybe more than the straightforward pitch. Precisely. Precisely. It's a way to maybe coax a difficult subject out.

And then I also thought that the set for their hotel in Iowa, it wasn't quite the Marriott in downtown Des Moines, but it felt reminiscent enough. of it. This is that fabled Marriott I was reading so much about where all the pissed off and sad campaign reporters were hanging out. Yeah. Present company included. There's a buffet. Can you confirm that there's a big breakfast buffet that they were all eating off of?

So there was if you had enough Marriott points. There was like a buffet for some elite status. I did not have that status. so I had to find my own food in the middle of the blizzard. But, you know, that's okay, something to aspire to. Brian, what worked for you, if anything, in the first couple episodes? Well, I'm always very happy with any TV show or movie that uses the term clip job. Yes.

Something we don't normally hear in movies. I'm always fascinated. Also, Sadie's editor, who's played by Griffin Dunn, a kind of crusty newspaper editor type, looks at her copy and sees that she has candidates throwing jabs at each other, which is a real only in journalism, low energy kind of word to insert into your campaign copy. It was really happy with little details like that. I found the feel of this series,

and you can probably tell that we're going to set up for some things we didn't like about this here in a second, but I thought the moment-to-moment feel of the series was fun. It was interesting. I like the characters. I thought it was interesting and good that the creators of the show were trying to capture not just what we would understand as newspaper people competing for stories, but this kind of new world of campaign journalism where people play by different rules. I think that's right. I thought that the dynamics between the characters felt somewhat realistic to the Washington Post.

as a reporter is talking to the New York Times as a reporter and they're not necessarily sharing information, but there's a bit of collaboration of like, you know, going places together, asking some questions of, you know, what did I miss? And that's what Stady says that at one point. And the Washington Post ask reporter is like, I wouldn't tell you if you miss something good, would I? Um, when they're at a campaign event for one of the candidates. Um, the, the influencer to me, that character, the socialist influencer, was, I don't think it's quite accurate yet, but it felt like it was telling a story of something

that I could see happening in the next cycle of it, instead of having just newspaper and magazine types on the bus and video embeds, having these people who are sympathetic to the candidates, who, what is she paid in? Sponsored content in advance from Substack, I believe, was the line in the show. that scared me a little bit.

We know that the White House has done several meetings with friendly influencers, giving them some background information. They don't give other reporters. That feels like a future that's not that far off. Absolutely. Instagramers played by Natasha Benham and the Washington correspondent played very well by Carla Gagino. Let's talk about what you didn't like about the girls on the bus. It was a rough depiction of some pretty awesome.

awful stereotypes of women journalists, I think. In the first episode alone, there are three strikes. The woman journalist who is too emotionally attached to her subject, this Hillary Clinton-esque character, as you mentioned, the idea that she couldn't cover a campaign fairly because she's just so in bed with the woman candidate. She sleeps with a source, it would seem, in the first episode, that gets established pretty quickly.

and at the end of the first episode between this Fox News type journalist and her colleague, there's this kind of catfight, this competitive cat fight between two women who are both trying to get this interview with a candidate and it shows women not being collaborative and working nicely together and the language they used felt very gendered. That bothered me. It's hard enough to be a woman journalist in politics and I don't know if we need so many stereotypes that are bad off the bat in the first show. Yeah, and the second one you mentioned, romantic entanglement by female journalists and movies and TV with their subjects or with their story is one of the great awful tropes of all time.

I mean, everything. You can go to absence of malice with Sally Field, which is otherwise a fairly interesting movie. You go to this recent, very weird Richard Jewell movie that Clint Eastwood made, which was about a real reporter who was not. not around to answer for that depiction. I'm really surprised they went there. We can talk a little bit about the circumstances this happened. She had had a previous relationship or something like a relationship with a guy who then becomes the comms director of a candidate.

She's covering. So it's awkward. And then in the second episode, spoiler alert, if you want to watch this, he quits or tells her he's quitting basically. And then they rekindle the relationship. but then he's not quite out of the campaign. So she once again finds herself in this strange sort of in-between state where she has been entangled with her subjects sort of unknowingly.

But again, I just don't know we needed that in this show at all. I don't know that added anything to me, at least through the first two episodes. Right. And that does continue to develop throughout the show, which if people decide to watch all of it, they'll see how that goes. What felt realistic, if I had to defend including that in this, you know, you spend a lot of time with people on the trail.

In Washington, where I live, a lot of reporters are married to people who work in politics or something politics adjacent. Sometimes reporters are married to each other, people who work in politics. I mean, this is the social situation that we're all in. We live in the city. We meet people who do the work that we do. I thought the show did a good job making clear that Sadie was not sleeping with her source for information. It was not transactional. It was happenstance.

I bet you that does happen from time to time. In fact, we know it happens from time to time that you happen to be dating someone who happens to be working on something. Still, I don't know if we as viewers are ready to have. have enough of a nuanced view on that to not have it just come across as, as you said, an awful trope. I love the book that Amy Chosick wrote about her time covering the Clinton campaign. And what I loved was that she did this very simple thing that we all, all journalists all forget to do sometimes, which is just write down everything that happens.

And sometimes that's even more interesting than what you get in the paper or else is a great companion to what you get in the paper. And her book was filled with all this detail about like how mad the Clinton people and Clinton land would get with her stories, how mad they would get with specific details in her stories, how they would treat her the way they would seize on little things. The relationship she had with her editor, who's Carolyn Ryan, who's way up on the Times, Mastead now in real life. Just the whole sort of state of being reported was so fascinating to me. And I learned about so much about how things work and how stories are edited on that. beat and how you get scoops and what kind of scoops were loved by the paper, which were slightly different than the ones that I loved as a reader.

And I thought they could have had a lot of fun with that in this show. I thought you could have just, you know, whenever there's a show that's about an interesting profession, one of the things they can do is show how the profession really works. So that guy over there, let us imagine Sadie's inner inner narration saying does this for the candidate. And that guy over there treated me like this. And that guy is also in comms, but doesn't actually have any power. And his job is to do X.

I mean, there's a lot of, you know, sort of fine detail at a presidential campaign. I wish they had leaned a little bit more into that, at least in the two episodes that I saw. I agree, Brian. Something that that book does really well, too, is you mentioned that Amy Chosick worked for the Times. She also worked for the journal and had covered the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008. And so the book gives us a, you know, decades-long. view on Amy interacting with the same people across two different campaigns and seeing those relationships develop and change. So far, this show has been a little bit chaotic in terms

of the number of candidates they're introducing, a number of characters we have to keep track of. I would have maybe loved a show that was about embedding with only one campaign and having a little more time to show that back and forth, that give and take with people who are very close to a prominent, you know, would be nominee for president. Totally. A lot of plot points in the first couple episodes. So trying to, you know, which I understand, trying to get you to watch a show, trying to get pay off things.

And I would not suggest any TV drama to be co-produced by the press box pot and Neiman Lab. I am not, I'm not, not suggested we go in that deep. No offense to Neiman Lab. And one thing else, you know, it's funny. When I mentioned like the Chossook book, she wrote the story about Hillary Clinton before she was even running for president. So this would have been like 14, 15 kind of in that zone.

And she mentioned that the Clinton Global Initiative, the CGI, had flown Natalie Portman and her dog, first class, to an event. And that was the kind of detail that her editors at the paper loved. They're like, yes, this is great. This is what we want. That is also the detail to the Clinton campaign, kind of detail the Clinton campaign hated. And the kind of detail you and I know would later become the kind of but her email. style things that were used in that campaign to show that Hillary was this and that

Donald Trump would sort of have in triplicate and get away with. Again, that's fascinating. I think there is a cinematic or TV way to get stuff like that across about journalism without going too deep into the weeds. I don't know if they could do that, but I would have loved to sing just little things like that that were about writing and politics. I would agree. In the second episode, there is an attempt at that when Sadie is pouring over some old pieces she wrote, she has an exchange with one of the candidates, Felicity Walker, who is a Democrat, who is the candidate from prior cycle, who she loved. Sadie's pouring over her stories after Felicity Walker tells her that she was starky and focused too much on certain details.

And Citi's rethinking the fact that she told the world, Felicity liked a snack of like, what was it, three slices of avocados. Pre-slice, avocados. Pre-slice, sorry, pre-sliceed avocados. And she's like, should I have said that? And her editor said, that's a great detail. Like, that was why we loved that story. And it is not your job to make people happy.

They did not, however, do what you just said, which is then use that to talk about the state of democracy, how stories like that, details like that can have maybe perhaps a consequence on on the in general view of a candidate and change the narrative such that someone like Donald Trump can win.

But, you know, there's still episodes to come. Perhaps more will be said on that subject. In the same way that Obi-1, Kenobi and Yoda would appear to Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movies after they died, Sadie has some conversations in this show with Force Ghost Hunter S. Thompson,

would you make of that? Right. I actually had forgotten that. Perhaps blocked it out up until this moment. I mean, that's another thing. It's adjacent to the trope that Sadie is too emotionally connected to the candidate. As a supposedly New York Times reporter, it seems that Sadie were meant to think that Sadie is warring with wanting to be

a subjective writer that she wants to be someone who writes opinion pieces or inserts herself more into her own stories, which I found to be very strange. I don't know too many people who work for the New York Times at that level who are constantly worrying about that. Hunter S. Thompson is her hero, who of course is the big gonzo journalist who took a lot of factual liberties when he was writing for places like Rolling Stone back in the 70s covering candidates. He said that he was, you know, very much with a candidate whenever he wrote about the candidate. As a ghost figure in the show, I don't think it works yet, at least. But I appreciate

the fact that, you know, he's mentioned and hooray for Gonzo journalism, it has its place. What did you think, Brian? Yeah, I guess if I had to defend it, and I'm not ready to defend it, But if I had to, if we were doing mock trial here, I think I would say the like journalists, and I'm sure I'm putting you and I in this category, we read all the old stuff. We study the old masters. We are maybe kind of in conversation with the old masters when we're sitting there at our desk and looking at our own copy that doesn't measure up and go, why don't we write as good as that person did? So I guess as an expression of that, you know, what campaign reporter hasn't carried around Richard Ben Kramer's what it takes? and thought, I'd like to write something like this. I'd write something of this ambition and scope and that's this different.

And inevitably, because we aren't Richard Ben Craper, it doesn't happen. It doesn't happen exactly in the same way. So maybe on those grounds. Yeah, I think that's right. I am curious, though, because Hunter has Thompson, even in the pantheon of, like, great political journalists, he's very different Richard Ben Kramer. They're both kind of a version of new journalism, but they're very different. and I think that Hunter S. Thompson just being so diametrically opposed to everything that the New York Times sort of stands for, at least like as we understand journalism now and what he did back in the day.

I thought that was an interesting choice. He's also deceased, so perhaps it was easier just to kind of, you know, depict him in that way. He could be a forced ghost in a way that some of the others couldn't. Also, I read that this series was a Netflix series originally and it went to CW. for a while. And then it winds up on Max. It very much felt like that to me that had had been a couple of different kinds of shows and that they'd arrived at kind of an uneasy medium

between these shows. I think that's right. I also read that production for this or perhaps rewrites for this started pre-pandemic, that this was optioned sometime in 2018 or 19 and there was a version of it with Netflix that was being considered pre-pandemic. So much of journalism has changed,

even from when Amy wrote her book to 1819 to 24, it felt to me like it was also trying to hold space for the last decade of journalism and the various characters who exist and those to come. I would be curious what this show looked like in 2019. Was there an influencer in this way? perhaps not. I bet you there was definitely

the Washington Post and the New York Times reporter and the Fox News reporter. But yeah, it did have that feel to it, that it had been a couple different things before it settled into this form. Since we're real-life journalists, can we do some pedantic fact-checking of the girls on the bus?

For sure. All right. Sadie's newspaper editor, the aforementioned Griffin Dunn, has an office that is bigger than most studio apartments. That was incredible. Four Pinocchio's.

Sorry, nobody has an office like that, but they don't anymore. Have you seen any big offices before, Brian? I've seen one that was big. It was Gus Wenner's at Rolling Stone, but he's the publisher. Like this is the public, with like one couch for like meeting with, I would assume, famous people. Sure. Yeah.

This guy was the political editor, let's say, a political editor. let's say a high ranking editor, yeah. He was also smoking in his office, which kind of went out of style with Hunter S. Thompson and rolling stuff back in the 70s. Not sure you can do that anymore. Also, a reference to the Nate Silver Statistical Needle. I believe that is the Nate Cone statistical needle

that he is the co-inventor of that particular device at the times. That's a post-silver invention, pretty sure. That's right. Check with you. If you heard a reporter make any of the following statements in real life. Quote, the road is my home.

Oh, God. If someone said that, I feel like they'd have to get a swirley. Never say it like with meaning. Not like literally. It's more of it. If someone was ever,

I don't know anything like that to me, it's been sarcastic, I feel. Yes. What about quote, front that shit on page one. You had an occasion to say that at the post? I have not.

But the front page meeting is something that I don't attend. And I've never been so bold as to insist stuff gets fronted on page one. Do we think a reporter at a conservative TV network would have a photo of Colin Powell on the wall of their home? I don't know. It was a little on the nose. It was a little on the nose, but journalists do have very weird photos around and images. I feel like on my walk over here from my desk, I saw a couple of, you know,

there's press passes and then there's images of other journalists. People keep at their desks. But no political figures. I don't see any political figures really on the walk here. Yeah, I was going to say, more campaign signs, old campaign posters, I could believe. But I've never seen a photo of Colin Powell before. Also, a lot of very direct personal contact

between the politicians and the candidates? I thought, like, am I doing my job wrong? I feel like I never get to spend so much time with the candidates. I don't think I am. I think that on this show, for purposes of character development, they're exaggerating, you know, how easy it is to find a candidate. I will say in Iowa this year, just because of the amount of snow and how snowed in we all were across two hotels

in downtown downtown. Des Moines, there was a lot more candidate interaction, a lot more opportunity to be caught in an elevator or in the same restaurant or in the same bar. But that, that to me was very much atypical. This is a personal one for me, but Sadie, when she's throwing aside all that New York Sentinel objectivity and trying to write what she really feels, she writes a piece, the thesis of which is politics is a reality show, which Shoemaker and I gave the Think Peace Championship Belt to was the most overused, possible construction of any campaign story. Like, yes, we know. We got it, folks. It started being written when Survivor was on the, well, sorry,

I was still there. When Survivor was new on the air, okay, that wasn't going off road, that we already wrote that. That's my gripe. Let us finish up here, Karen, with some nosy questions about your career. Oh, no. Everybody's favorite subject. Your job at the Washington Post is to cover vibes.

How do you cover vibes? How do you cover vibes? It's a daily question for myself and my editors. So taking a step back, I get a lot of questions about what is a style section. I hope listeners to this show know, but if they don't, it's not just fashion and it's hardly fashion. We have one fashion writer full time at the Washington Post. She's wonderful. the work that I do is I am a politics reporter

and what we were kind of like magazine-esque in terms of how we think about things and approach subjects we have a point of view. Our job is not to do necessarily what happened at any given event, more to describe what was it like. A example I'll pull on is last year, Bernie Sanders started hauling CEOs and billionaires before Congress to yell at them for myriad offenses like mistreating workers or having too much money. And the story wasn't just those facts, but that, you know, look how happy Bernie Sanders is doing this. Look at how he's smiling. Look at how he's gleeful. He's chuckling. He's having the time of his life, you know, telling Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz to get out of town and start paying his taxes and letting his, let his workers unionize.

We try to spot trends. We do, this is a dreaded term, but the conceptual scoop of what are you seeing? What are you noticing that people aren't talking about? My colleague, Van Terrace, a wonderful Washington Post style writer, did a story about awkward Americans who see themselves in Ron DeSantis, which was just phenomenal because Ron DeSantis was pretty awkward, the way he couldn't really control his mouth. his eyebrows, the whole thing seems like this choreographed on his face. And for a number of Americans, they're like, you know what? I don't like his politics, but I get it. This seems hard to do all the right expressions at the right time.

We do stories like that. Mike Johnson had a little moment with that the other night too, but anyway, sorry to interrupt. Anyway, yes, yes. So that's covering vibes. You get into journalism during the Trump years, which now feels like ancient, history, not ancient political history, but ancient journalistic employment history, what was political journalism, remind us, what was it like during that period? I want to preface this by saying, when you had Chris Dwell and Trampon on the other week

or a few weeks ago now, talking about your inability to tell young journalists how to get started. You've had decades-long career. My career is seven years old. And I still related to that very much because everything just feels totally different now. I got started in 2017. I went to J-school, which is a popular thing to admit, but I'll admit it to any other J-school graduates out there. And there was this feeling of we don't really know how we're supposed to be covering Trump, but there's a lot of traffic and there's a lot of money that we know we have to cover him. There's the accountability angle.

There are all these characters in the Trump White House that hadn't been met before who were deserving of attention. There was a lot of leaking happening, which just made reporting easier. You know, I was a little bit behind folks like Elena Platt and Olivia Newsie who also made their name in the Trump era. They had a couple of years under their belt. And then when Trump showed up, either, you know, Olivia covered Trump for the Daily Beast. Elena had been at Washingtonian and had gotten sourced up and started doing these wonderful pieces. You know, Trump was a great equalizer for folks like them because you didn't have to have been around Washington for 100 years the way you have to for Biden. That there are exceptions, of course.

My colleague Tyler Fager is one of them. But, you know, a lot of people were able to become sourced up with this new group of people and report well. And for me, I'm riding the coattails of the Trump bump. and I'm there's a lot of chances for a new reporter, a new writer to get a full-time job. Places are hiring. And I'm getting a lot of experience very quickly that, you know, frankly, there just aren't as many entry-level jobs like that right now. I was, Mother Jones was able to hire me as a full-time staff writer after a year of a

fellowship. That was really cool. They did that for a number of folks who were coming through the doors. There was just so much expansion. And it was great that people. got to have so many clips and chances to report on stuff. And it makes me sad because this Trump era we're in right now doesn't seem to be lending itself to that kind of financial flexibility to those types of jobs for folks. It's really, it's really just too bad because,

you know, I feel I feel very lucky. So much of this job is luck. But having an opportunity to show what I could do, I feel like was a huge difference maker for me in my career. when you look back at that first Trump bump and maybe now the only Trump bump in retrospect, how much of it do you think was affection from the public for us journalists and what we do and how much of it was people saying my subscription to this publication will be like my membership fees in the resistance. And that's why I am interested in journalism. I think it was definitely both of those things. I think a lot of people felt like, they wanted to support journalists.

Journalists were being attacked verbally by the president and his aides. It was a pretty, or pretty public, you know, spats between the press and the White House at the time. It's also a lot of swag. Do you remember all of like the t-shirts? You could buy them on like, I forget maybe Cotton Bureau is the name of the site, but you could buy like a pro-public, a t-shirt. you could buy a Washington Post t-shirt. They were like meant to be fashion.

There were a lot of ways that people could kind of support journalism in this way. So yeah, I think people viewed journals in that way. But I also think there was a lot of interest in news. I mean, this was so novel and different. And the American public wasn't in the pot of boiling water the way they are now. Like they've been the frog. And like the temperature has slowly been turned up. And things just become more and more normalized.

They're like, oh, yes, this is what Trump. was doing, oh yes, there's been a coup. Oh, yes, like the so-and-so is totally corrupt. At the time, it was still like eyes glued. And I think that that actual literal interest in news, we don't talk about that enough. It's not just about, you know, supporting one side of the other based on what you were reading and what you were doing. But like, people wanted to know what was going on in Washington. There's a new and crazy story unfolding in front of me and I just have to know right now and I have to have a subscription to the post times and everything else so I can just know everything about this story. Exactly. It's so fascinating. When you look at this different, this second

Trump or well, this is Trump's third run for president. When you look at it, do you think you think that's what it is? The difference is this time that people normalized is a word we've used a whole bunch over the last seven years and change. But do you think in terms of the news, we're just, it has been normalized. It is less shocking. And that's why. made what accounts maybe for less of a second Trump bump I think normalized I think there's also

at least among liberal people I know there's a desire to turn away from it they don't they don't want to know there's a lack of newness which is slightly different from normalized I mean normal is something to be normalized

is like you're getting used to people and things that are happening. We don't really have any new characters in politics probably right now. There's RFK Jr. feels like about as new as it gets. Aaron Rogers, to bring it back to where we started, might be like. Not yet, we don't, but wait until March 26th. That's right, in Oakland.

A certain multi-time MVP quarterback who's got some ideas. I'll leave it at that. All right, Karen, come back, please, before the election, chat more about all things under the sense. Wonderful to have you. Read Cara, vote at the Washington Post. Kara, thank you so much for coming on the press box. This was the best. Thank you so much, Brian.

Let me welcome back David Shoemaker, because David, the people have spoken. They want a second weekly edition of David Shoemaker guesses the strain pun headline. Should we do a bit where, like, you have, like Brian makes it sound like you're clung me on a landline and I act like I'm just waking up every time that we do this one. I wasn't on today. Yeah. Oh, man. I'm going to sleep for like the last 48 hours, but sure, I'll guess a pun headline.

Today's headline, David, comes to us from Deep Sleut Dog. It's from the Associated Press. This sounds like a fascinating story. It's about a spy pigeon that was released after eight months in detention in India. The pigeon was in jail? The pigeon was in jail because it was found last May with a message that was said to look like it contained Chinese characters.

So it was a suspected spy pigeon. Thank you to the AP for using suspected. So we didn't libel the pigeon. Got to love that. A reported spy pigeon wouldn't want the family of the pigeon to come after us looking for money. I think that's about all you need, though. Consider why you would put the pigeon in jail rather than releasing it on its own recognizance.

As you consider, what was the AP's strain pun headline? Because it would presumably fly back and you don't want it to return. Right. And we would call that a... A... A... Not return? Prisoner might...

When a prisoner might not... Oh, fly the coup? Well, that's funny. But... somebody who's in we're holding because they are a they escape we don't want them to escape we don't want them to call them they have escape potential so we call them a flight a flight risk is that the whole thing here which actually perfectly works with this it's perfect i'm so confused about this story though i mean i'm sure i'm just i just have to read it and i will understand it like everything

else in the world but that's yeah just just call it a suspect it's by pigeon Please. We're doing journalism here. That's the press box. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Brian Waters. Coming up next week, we're going to do it Friday rather than Thursday. Jay Caspian Kang.

You know I'm from the New Yorker, you know from New York Times. You know him from Grantland back in the day. Jay Caspian Kang will talk about the NCAA tournament and many, many other subjects. Also want to put this idea on your radar one more time, the Democratic National Convention, August 19th through 22nd. You know about that. You may not know that I'm going to do a live podcast recording and or a meetup with the fine listeners of the press box.

If you're interested in attending, send me a note. You can DM me at the press box pod or email me, Brian.curtis at the ringer.com. I've got a fantastic response so far. Shoot me a note if that is of interest to you. Shoemaker and I return Monday. I've got something to tell them about obituaries in the New York Times. A very, very important update on Obitz.

Plus, of course, more lukewarm texts about the meet. Have a fantastic weekend.